Giving Up the Ghost

by Phoebe Rivers

  “Collins!” he boomed.

  Of course, I was the only one who could hear him.

  “Need you to do me a favor, Collins! Now, don’t you go rushing out on me again! I know your tricks! Hey! Collins!”

  “Gotta run,” I said to my friends, already standing and turning to hustle out of the cafeteria. “See you, guys.”

  And I ducked out before the spirit could make his way toward me. Well, at least I’d managed to do something right. I’d managed to avoid the spirit for one more day.

  I was good at avoiding things.

  Chapter 8

  By the time school was out on Thursday afternoon, the gloomy skies had cleared a little. The sun actually looked as though it was trying to peer out from the light-gray clouds. Puddles were everywhere, though, and I got soaked twice by cars fanning water on me as they whooshed through waterlogged streets.

  When I got home, Lady Azura was waiting for me. I peeled off my wet jacket and hung it on a hanger on the inside of the closet door, where it could drip dry without soaking everything around it.

  “I’ve made some tea,” she said by way of hello. “Run up and change into dry clothes and I’ll pour you a cup.”

  A few minutes later, I was sitting at the cozy kitchen table, my hair still damp and stringy, but warm again in my comfiest sweats, sipping sweet tea and nibbling on the cookies Lady Azura had put out on a little plate for me. I felt some of the stress of the day melt away.

  “Finish your tea,” she said as I reached for the last cookie. “Then come into my room. We must meditate together.” She stood up and walked out of the kitchen, leaving a trail of exotic scent in her wake.

  I had known her long enough to understand that what she really meant was, “Hurry up and finish your tea.” So I gulped down one more sip, carried my cup to the sink, and then followed her into her room.

  She was already sitting at her table, eyes closed, calmly breathing. She opened one eye and addressed me. “Come. Sit. We’ll meditate together and see if we can’t rid the house of what is afflicting it.”

  I sat down warily.

  “The negative energy that has invaded this house must be offset by positive energy. I have given this matter much thought, and I believe that if we combine our powers, we can rid the house of this terrible burden.”

  “Do you know the source of the bad energy?” I asked.

  “That’s not important,” she said. She kept her eyes closed and hummed. She was avoiding my question. I was sure of it.

  I tuned in to her thoughts. I heard a name: Nina Oliver. Then, as if a trapdoor had slid closed, I couldn’t access her thoughts anymore.

  She reached across the table and took both my hands in both of hers. They were tiny, with gnarled knuckles and large rings, but her grip was firm and warm. “Close your eyes. Think deeply,” she instructed.

  I closed my eyes. Opened them again. Her eyes were closed, her lips quietly chanting something I couldn’t hear. I felt uncomfortable doing this. I didn’t know how to meditate. I breathed deeply. Tried to relax.

  And almost immediately had a vision.

  The room whirled around, faster and faster, reminding me of the time when I was a kid and I would twirl around and around to make myself dizzy. When the room came to a stop, I found myself no longer holding hands with Lady Azura. I was standing in the kitchen. It seemed to be late. Very late at night. I could see snow coming down outside the window. It was heaped on the windowsill. The calendar on the wall showed that it was February of this year—just last month.

  The white-haired woman from my dream stood in a corner of the kitchen, facing Lady Azura. But now the woman was no longer alive. She was clearly a spirit. She looked much older than she had in my dream. Now she was an old woman, although probably not quite as old as Lady Azura. But she looked wearier. Careworn. Her eyes darted from side to side. Her movements seemed twitchy. Nervous.

  “Please. You must help me,” she said to Lady Azura. Her voice was dry and cracked. Not the firm voice from my dream. Her former confidence seemed to have vanished.

  Lady Azura was dressed in her dressing gown, wearing no makeup. As though she’d come into the kitchen late at night, after everyone else was in bed. Which made sense. I often thought I heard her roaming around the downstairs while I lay in bed.

  Lady Azura’s hands clutched the countertop behind her. I noticed her knuckles turned lighter. “I tried to help you when you were alive,” she said, firmly but not unkindly. “It will be much harder now. Yet there is still a way to reverse the course. You know what you must do, Nina.” My great-grandmother’s brown eyes were sad. Filled with pity.

  “I—cannot do it on my own,” said Nina the spirit, her voice trembling.

  Lady Azura looked down at the floor and sighed heavily. “I will try to help you now, but you must help me help you. It will be very difficult for me. I must know that you will do the right thing.”

  “I will. I swear,” said the spirit.

  Suddenly the vision shifted.

  Lady Azura and the white-haired woman—still a spirit—were seated across from each other at Lady Azura’s table. My great-grandmother was still wearing her dressing gown. Now I could see the clock over the entry door, and it read 1:20 a.m. I stood nearby, looking down at them, but neither seemed to know that I was there. And yet I could smell the faint scent of patchouli, hear the knocking of the old radiators, feel the chilly draft that escaped from beneath the heavy drapes at the window. Outside, icy snow pattered against the window.

  Several large, green crystals lay between them. Moldavite crystals. Like the one Lady Azura had given to me.

  The spirit was trembling. She looked as though she might cry. The air in the room felt dark. Heavy. I found it hard to breathe. I felt an overwhelming sense of gloom and desolation. Hopelessness.

  “You must let go. You must forgive them. Tell them how you feel. Show them. Release the energy, Nina. Release it, please.”

  “I cannot,” she gasped. “It’s too late.”

  “You can. You must. Together we must try.”

  The spirit was quiet for maybe a full minute, although it was hard to know how much time was passing. Then all at once she gave a shriek. I jumped. Lady Azura’s eyes flew open.

  I watched as a dark cloud whooshed out of the spirit’s body. It startled me so much that I gasped and jumped backward. It formed a smoky, roiling cloud, dark as a smoke cloud, but somehow even thicker.

  Just like the cloud I’d seen in my room.

  It occurred to me that the cloud seemed to be propelled by anger. Agitation. It whipped furiously around the room. The spirit and I followed its path, this way and that. Lady Azura sat calmly, staring at the spirit. I was certain she couldn’t see the cloud. Didn’t know it was there.

  Then the cloud slammed into a mirror on the wall, cracking it so that long, branchlike strands grew across it, like the surface of thin ice on a pond. But it didn’t make a sound. Lady Azura did not seem to notice this, either, although the spirit and I both saw it. So that’s what happened to the mirror, I thought, remembering how the mirror had just disappeared from Lady Azura’s wall one day last month, and she’d refused to tell me anything other than that it had broken.

  I saw the cloud swirl and shift, and then it seemed to get sucked out of the room, under the closed door. Out into the house. Just as it had in my bedroom after my dream.

  The vision ended.

  “Sara? Are you all right?”

  I blinked. Stared at her. I had beads of sweat on my forehead and on my upper lip. I was breathing heavily. The vision had been so . . . vivid.

  Lady Azura was giving me one of her laser stares. Her eyes bore into me.

  “Sara. You must tell me what happened.”

  Now I was officially freaked out. I’d dreamed about this woman twice. Then I’d seen her in a vision. Lady Azura cl
early knew her. Suddenly I felt angry. She knew more than she was telling me. All this talk of “bad energy.” I had seen with my own eyes that the bad energy had been released into our house by this spirit. It hadn’t just spontaneously shown up. There was more to the story. It didn’t seem right that she was holding back information from me.

  I decided to just come right out with it.

  “Who is Nina Oliver?”

  Lady Azura went pale.

  Chapter 9

  When someone who wears that much makeup loses all the color from her face, you know you’re onto something.

  Then she recovered. She folded her hands and leaned toward me, speaking in a calm, clear voice. “Sara. It is very important that you tell me what just happened to you. Did you have a vision?”

  I met her eyes. I could be just as strong. I would tell her, but first she had to tell me what she knew.

  “I think you’re keeping something from me,” I said. “I’m not a kid. Well, I mean, I am, but I’m also old enough to handle this. You have to please tell me who Nina Oliver is. Because I have seen her three times.”

  She sat back. She looked surprised. I guess I’d never really shown that I had much backbone before. I think I might have been as surprised as she was, but I tried not to show it. I just sat there and didn’t look away.

  “Very well. If you have seen that dreadful woman so many times, then you have a right to know.” Lady Azura’s eyes searched my face as she spoke. “I will tell you the story of Nina Oliver.” And with that, she cleared her throat and launched into her story.

  “Nina came to visit me many years ago—it was more than twenty years ago, in fact. But she came not as a client, she told me, but as a colleague. She told me that she had a special power. She was able to read people’s minds.”

  Lady Azura sat back and regarded me. I nodded, like that information came as no surprise. I mean, I’d seen and heard firsthand the way she read my own mind.

  Of course, I could see that Lady Azura registered my response. She continued.

  “It started happening to her very suddenly, when she was in her late forties. Her children had grown. She was an attorney at a large law firm, well respected for her keen analytic mind, but, I gathered, not on a partnership track because she was not well liked by her colleagues. I could see why. She was argumentative. Unwilling to listen to what others had to say. Arrogant.

  “She came to me, she said, for advice. Her powers came and went sporadically. She wanted to learn to better harness the power, so she could use it to her benefit. But she did not like what I had to say to her. I told her this power was not the gift she believed it to be, but a terrible burden, and a destructive one. I told her I would help her to rid herself of this power, if she so chose.”

  Now the second dream I’d had made sense. The one where Nina had given the crystal back. The one where Lady Azura had been urging her—pleading with her, really—to relinquish her power rather than to strengthen it. “So you mean, being able to read minds is always a bad thing?” I asked without meeting her eye.

  “Our thoughts belong to us, Sara. They are precious. And they should be private. The choice to share our thoughts and feelings should be our own. And the ability to hear others’ thoughts can be terribly destructive to the one who possesses the power. But then,” she said, looking at me keenly, forcing me to meet her eyes, “I suspect that you have learned this firsthand.”

  My breath caught in my throat. How did she know?

  She continued. “At first Nina seemed to want to work with me. She came back twice. She used the moldavite crystal I gave her to work on blocking out the power. But it seems the power was too seductive. Her ability to read others’ thoughts turned out to be extremely beneficial in her capacity as a litigation attorney.”

  “As a—what?”

  “A lawyer who argues cases in court. She became a much-feared litigator who, of course, could always know what the opposition was going to do before they did it.”

  I nodded. I could see why reading minds would be an advantage to a lawyer.

  “She came back to me one more time. But it was to return the crystal I had given to her. She told me she was working on strengthening her powers, not blocking them. When I tried to tell her I thought she was making a huge mistake, she accused me of being jealous.” Lady Azura sniffed, as though the memory was something she’d prefer not to dwell on. “She called me a charlatan.”

  “A what?”

  “A fake. I suppose I lost my temper with her. She was not an easy person to deal with, and it was difficult to maintain one’s professional composure when she turned combative. But that was the last straw. I threw her out.”

  “Oh,” I said, suppressing a smile. I remembered my dream where my tiny great-grandmother had thrown the woman out. Leave it to Lady Azura to stand up to one of the toughest cross-examiners in the business, without so much as batting a fake eyelash.

  “That was the last I saw of her for a very long time. She was promoted to partner, and then left the local firm to join a famous, high-powered corporate law firm in New York. I began reading about her cases in the newspaper. Some of them made national headlines. But she remained a deeply insecure and unhappy person at heart. She grew ever more greedy and became obsessed with her power. I heard through the grapevine that her personal life suffered greatly. She refused to do the hard work necessary to repair her broken relationships. Her husband left her. Her grown children moved far away from her. It became a vicious cycle: the more difficult she became as a person, the more frequently she read others’ minds and heard their negative thoughts about her. She alienated her children’s spouses. She was too critical of the way they raised her grandchildren.”

  “So,” I said, “she was really successful professionally, but lost all her friends personally.”

  “That’s correct.” Another meaningful look my way. “She became very rich, I heard. She won the vast majority of her cases, and she defended some powerful but, shall we say, unsavory clients.”

  She was quiet for a time, lost in thought.

  “And then what happened?” I prompted her.

  “I stopped reading news of her about ten years ago. Her name had been in the papers frequently, and then suddenly it wasn’t. I forgot about her, to be honest. And then, several weeks ago, she reappeared. But she was no longer a living person.”

  “She was a spirit,” I said.

  Lady Azura nodded.

  I wasn’t surprised by this information, of course. I’d seen her as a spirit in my vision.

  “She died lonely and bitter. Her husband had remarried. Her children had stopped speaking to her. For the first time since I had known her, she appeared humble. Contrite. Alas, too late. But she told me what had happened. The last few years prior to her death, her power had reached such strength that she was unable to filter out others’ thoughts at all. Everywhere she went, she heard the thoughts of the people around her. It slowly began to drive away her reason.”

  “You mean, she went crazy?”

  “That’s a harsh way to describe it, but accurate, I suppose. She quit her job. Her children helped her find a retirement community that sounds like it might have been more of a very well-financed psychiatric residency program.”

  I gulped.

  “Her spirit told me that while there, she withdrew from the company of others more and more. She simply couldn’t block out their thoughts. Eventually she fell ill and died. But death brought her no relief. Her spirit was stuck here, and bore the same burden.”

  “Her spirit could also read minds?”

  “Yes, and so she visited me late one night a few weeks ago, in February. I wasn’t sure whether I could help her. But she was so remorseful. She begged me to help her. I pitied her. I tried to help her.

  “I explained to her how spirits can become trapped here sometimes. I told her that we ha
d to exorcise the negative energy from within her spirit. She had to start by forgiving herself, and more importantly, others. She had to acknowledge that people are flawed—not just herself, but all the people who had once loved her. That everyone harbors thoughts deep inside that are just that: thoughts. Practically everyone has dark thoughts, but these thoughts are not meant to be overheard. They’re a way by which people work through issues in the safety of their minds.”

  I had the feeling that she was talking as much about me as she was about Nina Oliver.

  “Nina had never understood her power while she was alive. I felt she had to reach that step before she would be able to move on. So we had a session, such as I have never had before with someone who has passed on to the spirit world. Highly unusual. And very difficult for me. I am still not sure of the outcome of that session.”

  “So that’s what I saw,” I murmured as it all became clear to me.

  Lady Azura looked at me sharply. “What did you see?”

  “The vision I had just now. It was of your session together. Of you trying to help her.”

  Lady Azura sat up even straighter in her chair. “Sara, this is extremely important. I need you to tell me exactly what you saw.”

  So I told her what I had seen. About the black cloud. About the broken mirror. About how the cloud vanished underneath the door.

  When she heard about the way the black cloud had escaped from the spirit and broken the mirror, she drew in a sharp breath. Like that explained a lot.

  Then I told her everything else. About my dreams. About the black cloud over my bed. And about my own ability to read minds. How it seemed to be gaining in strength and frequency with every passing day.

  Lady Azura listened intently. “This explains so much,” she said when I was finished. “I have not seen Nina’s spirit since that night, several weeks ago. I did not see the cloud you speak of, but I discovered the cracked mirror after she had gone. I was not sure how the two things were related, but I knew they were somehow.